Mishkah Reviews

The genius and sensitivity of the justly celebrated nineteenth-century Scottish artist David Roberts are fully revealed in this outstanding special three-volume collector’s edition that reproduces in unprecedented print quality all 247 of Roberts’ published drawings of Egypt and the Holy Land. In 1838 and 1839, Roberts spent eleven months traveling and sketching throughout Egypt from Alexandria to Abu Simbel and through Sinai to Petra, Jerusalem, Palestine, and Lebanon. The 247 lithographs that Belgian engraver Louis Haghe then produced at the rate of one a month from the drawings executed during Roberts’ extraordinary trip were published in six volumes by Francis Graham Moon, as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–46) and Egypt and Nubia (1846–49). This monumental work assured the artist of a fame that has lasted until the modern day. Once again in this limited collector’s edition, the wonders that Roberts saw on his trip and the style of life in the Middle East in the middle of the nineteenth century are brought vividly to life by the pictures and the original accompanying texts by the Reverend George Croly and William Brockedon. All admirers of David Roberts will want to own this unique and exquisitely produced edition.

Between 1859 and 1905, a number of photographers working in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, and northern Africa captured their landscapes, towns, and monuments, bequeathing an unprecedented visual documentation of the Middle East. Gardens of Sand brings together 100 original photographs, masterpieces mostly hitherto unpublished, taken between 1859 and 1905. The archive illustrates the themes of the expatriate photographers of the second half of the nineteenth century—study portraits, royal commissions, landscapes, inventories of significant monuments and buildings, orientalist scenes, steeped in classical European imagination—but also explores the confrontation between western imagination and the visual reality of the Middle East, a meeting that gave rise to a local photography, gradually moving further away from western stereotypes, and includes a critical analysis of orientalism and of photography as a means of conveying a reality of prejudices.